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5.4 is out!

Since May 2011 we have worked on releasing PHP 5.4, and now it happened. Thanks everybody who helped with it!

PHP 5.4 has some new and exciting features – for some of them, like traits, I have no idea right now how they will work out and what people would do with them. It’d be very interesting to see.
For some of them, I feel they are basic common sense and long overdue in PHP (of course, not everybody may share my opinion ;) – like [‘short’,’array’,’syntax’] or detaching <?= from INI settings. Some were just missing features that we didn’t catch up with before – more fluent syntax, linking objects to closures, etc.
Some things in PHP, as we have come to realize, were clearly mistakes – like register_globals, some were driven by real needs but proved to do more harm than good at the end – like magic quotes and “safe” mode – so we had to lay them to rest.

One of the best things that happened in 5.4 though is not immediately apparent. The engine behind 5.4 is significantly faster and consumes less memory than before. How much faster and how much less? Depends on your application, of course, but from some benchmarks 10-20% speed improvement and 20-30% memory improvement can be expected. Do your own benchmarks and blog about the results! Also would be a good time to ensure your application runs fine on 5.4 – since 5.4 is now the stable version and you have to start using it! :)

Another great things that happened – and is continuing to happen – is that we are finally moving towards more streamlined release process, towards having more regular releases (expect 5.4.1 release cycle to start in late March-early April and 5.4.1 be out in about a month after that) and more organized feature/change proposal process. There’s a wiki where people can post their RFC proposals, we have a voting process and while we may be still working out some fine details of the procedure, I feel we definitely have improved in this regard. It is time to get some organization into the process – we don’t need to create a bureaucracy, but some process is definitely needed and we’re establishing it.

Yet another thing that is happening – PHP project is slowly but surely moving from SVN to Git. This will be a great improvement. Having used Git for the last couple of years, I can clearly see that it can make many things we’re doing in PHP everyday so much easier. Can’t wait for it :) Also makes easy for people to do pull requests and for core devs to merge them, among other things – should make bug resolutions, etc. work faster.

And after catching our breaths a bit and relaxing soon there will be time to think what we do in 5.5 – remember the thing about more regular releases? :) I’ll try to post some thoughts about what I’d want in 5.5 soon.